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After 3 long months, a major security breach, and extended periods of social isolation, the new PkmnCards rating system is finally done! I’m really excited – but mostly relieved – to finally be finished. (I missed you, sun.) It’s been quite a circuitous road to completion, and at times I was worried that I’d bitten off more than I could chew code.

Thankfully, everything came together, I didn’t go totally crazy, and we have an end product. You can reference the orignal plans here, but I’m going to explain everything in detail below…

The Theory

The original rating system was based on a 10 point (star) scale. You would pick a somewhat – ok, very – arbitrary number ranging from one to ten, which had a literal rating to go along with it, like “Totally bogus” or “Good” or “Broken.” I was optimistic this system would turn out fairly accurate, but there were a couple issues:

1. I opened it up for anyone to rate cards, making this site prime trolling grounds. It was way too easy for PikachuFan25 to give all their favorite yellow rodents 10s and knock other cards down by giving them 1s.

2. Even if everyone took the ratings seriously, the number system is so subjective that the ratings would be inaccurate anyway. I mean seriously, what does an 8/10 mean when applied to a Pokemon card? This isn’t gymnastics where there are set criteria behind a given score.

“Goodness” in the Pokemon TCG is all relative, and that’s where the new rating system comes in…

Head-to-Head Matchups

Instead of giving each card an individual score, it makes a lot more sense to compare cards. Professor Oak vs. Clefairy Doll? Oak has had more of an impact. Clefairy Doll vs. Base Set Gastly? Gastly is considered one of the worst cards of all time, so I guess Clefairy Doll wins by default.

As you make more and more comparisons, you can start to build a picture of where cards rank in the grand scheme. As each card appears in a matchup, it gains +1 to its impressions, and if picked as the superior card, it gains +1 to its score. The losing card’s score stays static. The rating is then calculated as score divided by impressions times 100, which gives us a nice percentage.

There are a few nuances to how the matchups are displayed and recorded though, which you, the end-user, might not notice, so let me explain them below.

1. Random Card – But Not Twice

When you click to rate a card, it will be matched up against a totally random card. Random means from any set ever released. However, once two cards have been matched up, they will not face each other until they’ve been matched up against all other 6000+ cards at least one time.

This may be adjusted in the future if my wallet finds out keeping track of that many matchups clogs the database and jacks up my server costs, but for now this is the current – and optimal – setup. The reason why we want to make sure that we face each card one time before resetting and seeing duplicate matchups is because we don’t want the potential to face one card multiple times before seeing another, which would distort the ratings.

Say for example Claydol GE and Uxie LA unluckily got matched up 10 times in 100 impressions, while avoiding cakewalk matchups against the Spoinks and Joltiks of the world. That would have an impact on their ratings because one of them is going to be a loser more often than deserved.

2. Rating vs. Format + Set

It might seem a little extreme to have the matchups against a totally random card and not a card in the same format or same set, but my reasoning is that some sets and formats have weaker cards than others, and the goal here is to get an overall ranking for each card.

It wouldn’t be fair for Call of Legends to only be matched up against itself (Smeargle would be the best card ever), and leave Hidden Legends to duke it out all lonesome. The effect would be dampened when extending to formats, but there would still be skewed results. That’s why I want to throw everything into the blender.

But I am keeping track of each card’s rating against its own set and legal formats! My friend Charranitar came up with this great idea to record that data alongside the overall rating. It’s not being displayed yet though, as not enough data has been recorded yet and the numbers wouldn’t be very indicative of anything. Maybe 6 months down the road I’ll take a look and see if the format and set scores look ripe yet.

3. Automatic Update

When you close the matchup overlay, the card’s score will update live on the page. You’ll probably notice this and think it’s cool. (Which it is!)

Limited Voters

I’ve come up with a neat solution to prevent the cretins of the web from infiltrating the system: a registration quiz!

Originally I thought I was going to need to manually approve anyone who want to help rate cards, but I’m trying to be as hands-off with this site as possible and don’t want to spend time interviewing all hopeful contributors.

The main thing I’m trying to make sure is that anyone who is rating cards has at least someone basic knowledge of the Pokemon TCG throughout time, as the matchups will show any card from 1998 to 2012.

When you try to register, a brief 6-question exam is presented, and you must earn a 100% in order to successfully gain rating privileges. The questions cover a wide range of time periods, though anyone who’s played the game for a while should be able to rattle the answers off no sweat.

The quiz might be too easy at the moment, but I can make adjustments later if need be. So far 14 people have passed with flying colors in less than 24 hours, which is pretty impressive!

Skip + Back Features

If you come across a matchup where you can’t pick a winner, or you’re unfamiliar with the random card and don’t feel comfortable voting, then you can hit “Skip” to have a new matchup shown. No score or impression will be recorded for either card.

And if you accidentally click the wrong card, there is a “Back” link that will take you back to the previous matchup so you can emend your error. Neat, huh?

Keyboard Navigation

This is explained in the sidebar under the “Pro Tips,” but your left arrow (←) selects the left card, your right arrow (→) selects the right card, up (↑) skips, and down (↓) goes back.

After I got this implemented I stopped using my cursor. It’s a lot faster and more comfortable to hit the arrow keys! I think it’s also less likely to give you carpal tunnel (but no guarantees).

Battle Pit

And finally, the feature I just finished this morning:

The Battle Pit!

The Battle Pit throws two random cards against each other, which is somewhat more entertaining than matching 1 card over and over versus a random card. It’s a great way to kill time if you’re bored. There is even optional wild battle music from Pokemon Red/Blue to get you in the mood! (Thanks to Eric A. for the MP3 hookup.)

Conclusion

I think that sums up all of the features I was able to cram into this contraption. Major props to everyone who helped bug test in the early stages of the project; I couldn’t have gotten it running so smoothly without you guys and gals! Your input was extremely insightful and helped to make this thing really awesome.

It was quite a challenge getting this done, and I actually thought about giving up at one point. I was hoping to have this finished in May, but SixPrizes had gotten hacked towards the end of April. I had to drop everything and spend around 2 months trying to get 6P back to normal before thinking about working on any other projects.

By the time I finally had some free time and could work on the rating system, I debated whether it was even worth the effort. It had been almost 3 months since I last worked on it and gotten stuck on something. But I decided to go for it, and I’m glad I did.

In the coming months and years, I think this will turn out to be a real valuable resource for any newer players out there who want to get a general idea of what current cards are good, and it’ll give all players insight into playability of cards of yesteryear.

Hey everyone! Long time no see. There haven’t been many developments with the site the past couple months (since I removed the ads), but there are a couple things I want to bring to light today.

1. We need Dark Explorers scans!

Word on the street is that there were prereleases last weekend. If you went to one (or are going to one during an upcoming weekend), it would be awesome it you could help contribute card scans! You can find instructions on how to calibrate your scanner for optimal results here.

You do not need to crop the scans; I’ll be able to find someone to take care of that, unless you’re good at it. Last time Spike P. helped out with the image editing, and he did a stellar job.

I’ve got all the cards in the system as drafts right now; we just need the images and I’ll be able to publish them. I know there are some low quality scans floating around, but I’d rather wait for better ones since I know I’d eventually have to replace them.

2. New Rating System

I mentioned in the past that I thought the current rating system was going pretty well, and that the ratings would even out over time to become fairly accurate. This, however, hasn’t really panned out, as it seems like the first couple people that rate a card have a huge influence on its score.

For example, if a card starts off with a couple 10 ratings, subsequent raters usually assume the card is good, and give it a good rating as well (even if the card actually sucks). Vice-versa happens as well (bad ratings for good cards).

It pisses me off that the rating system hasn’t worked out because I really wanted this to be a good resource for newer players, so they could actually get a decent idea how good or bad a card really is. Right now, the ratings are a pretty lousy indicator of a card’s playability.

However, I do have another (better) rating system in mind. This is an early idea I had for how to get the most accurate ratings, but it was going to be more complicated to implement, so I took the easy way out and went with a pre-packaged ratings plugin (which is what we’re using now).

While I’m laying in bed, trying to fall asleep, I often philosophize and think about things deep topics which I don’t quite yet understand. One night last week I thought about the alternate rating system, and actually figured out a way to build it. I ran the scenarios through my head, then scribbled down the components necessary to make it work (so I wouldn’t forget anything), and set the paper aside to let the plan marinate a little longer in my brain.

Here’s basically how it’ll work (and PLEASE give me input if you have any ideas on how to make it better):

A. Head-to-Head Matchups

Right now you are shown one card, and you pick a score from 1 to 10. Numbers are extremely arbitrary, and even I, who has played this game for years, don’t even know how to accurately rate a card. There are so many variables to consider, and numbers don’t really mean anything.

How do you quantify the “goodness” of a card, you know? “Gyarados SF is a 9/10.” Ok… what does that mean?

Instead, I think it’s a lot better to compare cards. If you show me Gyarados SF vs Volbeat TM, I can say with certainty that overall, Gyarados SF is the better card. Maybe not in every single game situation, but overall, Gyarados is the more playable card. Gyarados SF vs Professor Juniper? That’s a little more difficult, but I would say Juniper is the more playable (and overall stronger or game changing) card.

You can be a lot more certain about which cards are good when you do one-on-one comparisons. If you do enough of these comparisons (maybe a few hundred for each card), I think you can start to build an accurate picture of where cards rank in terms of playability.

B. Click to Rate

The way this will work is that each card will have a link the says “Click to Rate,” and when you click it, an overlay window will display with the current card vs a random card. You will be prompted to click which card you think is better, then the window will refresh and a new random card will be matched up against our hero.

A new random card will be displayed until your mouse breaks, or you decide to click off the window. I want to get as much data as possible, so I’m not going to limit the number of matchups that show up. The more data we can collect, the better.

C. Random Card = ANY Random Card

I was considering limiting the random card that appears to be in the same set as the initial card, but the issue with doing that is not all sets are created equal. Power Keepers is a much weaker set than Next Destinies, for example.

If Power Keepers cards were only matched up against Power Keeper cards, then some cards would end up seeming a lot better than they really are. Vice-versa applies with Nest Destinies (good cards would seem worse than they really are).

I know with the power creep that has infested the game, newer cards are for the most part going to seem better than older cards… but’s accurate, I think. It might be better to compare cards only to others that are modified legal at the time, but cards always end up being in multiple formats, and either lose or gain power over time. Comparing vs any random card should be good enough.

Side note: I’m also considering maybe keeping track of both a card’s rating compared to all cards AND compared to its set. That might be the way to go.

D. Rating Calculations

Each time a card is displayed in a matchup, it will get +1 to its number of impressions. If a card is picked, it gets +1 to its score. The card that isn’t picked gets 0 added to its score. The rating will simply be displayed as the card’s score divided by its number of impressions, multiplied by 100 to get a percentage.

For example, if Gyarados SF is pitted in 100 matchups, and is picked as the better card 87 times, it will have a rating of 87%.

E. Minimum Number of Impressions

I think it’s important each card receives a minimum number of impressions before its rating is displayed, in order to prevent rating bias. If a card is rated once, and receives a 100% rating, then subsequent raters might think the card is godly, and keep picking it, even though it’s not that hot.

My initial thoughts were to make a minimum of 100 impressions before the rating is displayed. That seems like it should be a decent sample size, but I’m not sure. I should have paid better attention during statistics class… I forget how to tell what sample size makes a number “statistically significant.” I can tell you though that there are almost 6,000 cards in the database.

F. Limit the Voters

Lastly, I’m considering only letting authorized registered users vote, at least to start off. I want to prevent trolls like J-Wittz from giving Hoppips perfect ratings. I don’t like making people register, but it might be the best way to keep things legitimate.

At first I thought the trolling might be funny and went along with it, but it’s bad for the site. The database becomes a lot more helpful when the ratings are accurate.

G. Potential Issues

The main thing I’m not sure how to deal with is repeat ratings. What I mean by that is the same two cards getting matched up against one another, repeatedly, before they’ve been matched up with unrated cards.

If Gyarados SF got matched up against Gust of Wind 9 times in a row, then finally got paired up with a meager Magikarp, it might have only a 10% rating when it’s really not that bad. Ideally, it would be matched up against every card out there one time, then repeat the cycle.

With a smaller database, I feel it would be a bigger issue, but with 6,000 cards, my theory is that things should even out. I’m sure there is some way to prevent the same two cards from being matched up before all 6,000 are cycled through, so I’ll have to look into this.

I think that’s about it… I’ll try to starting coding tonight, though playoff hockey has put a damper on my productivity the past week and a half. Expect it to be done sometime in May.

Please leave feedback if you have any, and thanks for reading!

… sorta. The other morning as I was lying in bed, half asleep, not yet completely awake, I had this “eureka” moment where it hit me that I should try taking all the Google ads off this site. Instead, I could fill their real estate with other “ads” that would be less obtrusive for you and likely just as, if not more profitable for me anyway.

So I bolted out of bed and began yanking down AdSense and filled its voids with the following:

1. Top ad replaced by links to buy booster boxes

On the specific set pages, it’ll show the 2 best prices for booster boxes from that corresponding set, otherwise on any other page it’ll just show a listing for the most recently released set.

I don’t know if anyone here actually buys booster boxes, but I think it beats seeing Google ads.

2. Sidebar ad replaced by SixPrizes Underground promo

Because 6P UG is awesome and I run it… need I say more?

3. Footer ad replaced by random flavor text

This has instantly become one of my favorite features on the site. It shows a random flavor text at the bottom of each page, BUT it doesn’t say which card it’s from, and I was clever enough to cloak the permalink.

(Anyone looking for a new drinking game?)

It’s pretty addicting and fun trying to guess the Pokemon! I’m kind of dismayed since I know almost every single card off the top of my head after spending way-too-long typing out all the texts, but I’m sure I’ll become rusty in a couple weeks and it’ll be challenging again.

Overall removing the Google ads is a win-win for everyone since without them the site loads faster, looks nicer, is more enjoyable, and I should be able to recoup the couple bucks I was making in another form.

Sup everyone? I’ve been hard at work the past couple weeks coding up a few plugins that utilize the PkmnCards database, and while I’ve sent the stray Tweet and Facebook update on their progress, I thought I’d made a formal announcement about them here…

1. Pokemon Card Scan Linker for WordPress

I originally had this plugin running exclusively on SixPrizes in a very rudimentary form for a couple months, but decided to revamp it with more features and make it more user-friendly so other people with WordPress sites could use it too.

Basically what it does is search your content for mentions of Pokemon cards and links them to their respective entries in the PkmnCards database. Then, when the links are clicked, an elegant overlay emerges to show the card’s scan, specs, rating, pricing, and discussion, all via our database here.

The main draw to using the plugin is to provide reference images for all cards mentioned in your articles. Instead of having to explain what every card does that you talk about, or insert a bazillion images, the cards you discuss will be linked automatically and your readers will soon be speaking your language.

I’m hoping the plugin helps make it easier for new people to start Pokemon TCG blogs, as they’ll have a nice tool to make their site appear legitimate from the get-go. I know I wish I had this plugin when I first started 6P.

FAQ – Download it on WordPress.org

2. Pokemon Card Scan Linker for vBulletin

This is pretty much a carbon-copy of the WordPress plugin ported over to vBulletin, but with less features and settings (at least at the moment). It will check your vBulletin forum posts for mentions of Pokemon cards, and link them just as described above.

The reasons why this version of the plugin doesn’t come prepackaged with a goof-proof options page are A. I’m not that good at coding with vBulletin, B. I don’t like vBulletin’s add-on system, and C. I don’t envision too many sites using it anyway since it’s such a niche modification and there aren’t that many vB-fueled Pokemon TCG message boards.

That being said, I probably will refine it at some point incase there are any forum owners out there that want to use it. It is currently hosted directly on this site rather than vBulletin.org until I polish it up.

Despite the fact that it’s fairly bare bones, it does work, and if you want to customize the code to suit your needs, go for it dude.

FAQ – Download Link

3. Pokemon Card Search Engine for Firefox

You know how Firefox lets you select your search engine for its search box? You can add PkmnCards as one of your search engines! I’m sure most of you have probably figured out how to do this, but if you need instruction, watch this video.

And that wraps up the extent of the progress I’ve made on plugin creation over the past few weeks. If you know how to code and aren’t satisfied with my work, feel free to hack away at what I’ve written and make something even better if you can; just be sure to share your mods with me and the rest of the Pokemon TCG community.

This morning as I was wasting time checking the site’s traffic stats, it hit me that it would be cool to have a designated card for discussion every day (i.e. card of the day).

I love the random discussions we have going on right now and I want to help foster more dialogue, so I was thinking that having a COTD would be a good way to get more people engaged with the site.

I’m not exactly sure how I’m going to have it set up yet, but basically each day we’ll pick a new card and encourage everyone to rate it, review it, leave a comment, write a haiku about it… whatever really.

I want to make it fun and at the same time hopefully build up some helpful content for any newbies that want to learn a little more about the cards.

As far as publicizing it, I’ll for sure send a Tweet and Facebook update out (so make sure you follow and like us to get those). I may even beam the COTD out to the 6P Facebook and Twitter as well to get more people in on it.

On the homepage I’ll probably figure out a spot to put an image of the card and link to it in the sidebar on all other pages as well. I’m going to have to sort out some of the coding technicalities first, but it should be doable. I should have most of it figured out within the next week.

EDIT: Took me like 10 minutes to sketch out the code; it is for sure doable.

Anyway, if you have suggestions or feedback on this idea, please comment below. I think it could turn out to be pretty cool.

I think I’ve sunk to an all-time low with cheesy post titles on this one…

I meticulously worked the past two days on piecing together functional iPhone and iPad versions of the site for you guys, and I just wanted to announce that they’re good to go!

If you visit the site with any smart device like an iPhone, iPod Touch, or iPad, the mobile version should boot up. You can also add the site as an App, which basically just bookmarks it for you. (It’s not really an App.)

I personally do not own any of the aforementioned devices, so that made it a little difficult for me to build the build the new sites as I’m not sure what the norm in terms of layout and everything, but hopefully they work ok. They are a little stripped down and simplified, but should do the job.

As always, let me know if you have any feedback or suggestions.

-Adam

Hey dudes and dudettes,

Some scans from the upcoming set Next Destinies have been leaked/released onto the internet, so I added them to the database. (Thanks to PidgiPress for the tip-off!)

The set is due to release on February 8, 2012, so you’ve got a bit of waiting to do before you can get your hands on those shiny Mewtwo EXs.

Here’s the full press release:

IN STORES FEBRUARY 8, 2012

Theme Decks Booster Packs
MSRP: $11.99 MSRP: $3.99
The Return of Incredibly Powerful Pokémon-EX Is Coming!

Pokémon Trading Card Game players everywhere, get prepared for the return of Pokémon-EX cards in the fourth expansion of the Black & White series: Pokémon TCG:Black & White—Next Destinies! Using advanced powers and new strategies, Trainers will battle like never before with awesomely powerful Pokémon, including two versions of six different Pokémon-EX!

Pokémon-EX are more powerful versions of Pokémon, giving Trainers great rewards when used effectively. But beware: Trainers also suffer heavier losses when those Pokémon are defeated! In Black & White—Next Destinies, players will find more than 100 Pokémon, including some—like Mewtwo-EX— from beyond the Unova region for the first time in this expansion! Discover elusive Pokémon like Reshiram-EX and Zekrom-EX. Black & White—Next Destinies delivers your destiny: Pokémon with exceptional HP, Special Energy and Trainer cards with expanded powers, and new strategies to extend your victory streaks!

Key features of the new Pokémon TCG: Black & White—Next Destinies expansion include:

• Two versions of six amazing Pokémon-EX, including the amazing Mewtwo-EX
• Six Pokémon-EX cards with character art covering the entire card and a special etching treatment never done before in the TCG cards industry
• Theme decks built around Legendary Pokémon Reshiram and Zekrom
• Over 100 cards in all

Each new theme deck and booster pack includes an in-pack code card that unlocks virtual cards for play in the Pokémon Trading Card Game Online. Expand your personal deck and battle against others from anywhere in the world at any time from your own computer! Battles are taking place now at www.pokemon.com/tcgo!

For more information about the Pokémon TCG: Black & White—Next Destinies expansion and Pokémon TCG Online, please visit www.pokemon.com.

The etching treatment sounds kinda cool. And we know there will be some secret cards since the scans say out of 99 on them.

As always feel free to rate and discuss the cards. This is the first set we’ve had (partially) up on the site before it was released, which is pretty cool.

Alright, well time to make dinner (2.5 pounds of baked potatoes… yum).

-Adam

P.S. Click here to download high res media files I was sent but am too lazy to post.

The Move

I spent most of Friday and Saturday transferring files to the new domain, and while I was worried that something might bug up, the move from TcgScans.com to PkmnCards.com was actually pretty seamless.

The only major thing that I could not really transfer perfectly was the comments. Any “likes” on the comments were lost, and also avatars associated with the comments are gone for the most part, but you can reclaim your old comments and restore the avatars by taking the following steps:

1. Make an account at Disqus.com

It’s free and it’ll take like 10 seconds if you use their Facebook connect feature.

2. Once logged in, look for the Edit Profile link.

It should be located in a drop-down on your username tab. Click that, and then it should ask if you want to merge comments. Say yes, and it should add any previously made comment on here to your Disqus profile.

You can change your avatar in the Disqus settings as well, and then it should show up on your old comments here.

Of course, if you notice any other bugs besides that, please let me know! Either comment or e-mail me at adam@pkmncards.com.

Ryan M e-mailed me earlier to let me know the set links in the menu were busted, so I fixed those. Thanks for letting me know dude!

Moving Forward

I need to go through and fix the prices on a bunch of cards. I’m hoping to get that done today, then I want to make a page listing all the sets (incase you don’t want to use the nav menu).

That’s pretty much all I have planned at the moment. I need to take a little bit of a break from working on this site!

-Adam

P.S. Make sure to click the Facebook Like Button, Twitter Follow Button, and Google +1 Button on the home page. It really helps us out!

Hey everyone,

If you haven’t noticed, over the weekend I changed up the colors of the site and the layout of the homepage a little bit. You can thank YouTube for the soothing grey background which I’ve stolen borrowed from them. I think the grey is a little easier on the eyes and makes viewing the site more pleasurable.

On the homepage I got rid of the Computer Search image and moved up the Recent Comments list so it’s more visible without scrolling. I also added avatars to the comment listings and extended it to show the 25 most recent comments instead of 5. I think this helps by encouraging more discussion and makes the site more fun.

The Thinker

Anyway, as I was working on these changes I had some time to reflect and think about the direction I want to take the site into the future. The original plans with the site were to have it be a database of card scans for all card games.

However, I didn’t really research THAT much into all the different card games out there, so my plan was a little misguided. I didn’t realize it, but there are a TON of card games out there. In my head, I was thinking there are Pokemon, Magic, Yu-Gi-Oh, and WoW… and that’s it. Right?

But upon further research, I realized there are a ton of other smaller games out there – like Naruto, Maple Story, Redakai, etc. – and many more that have ended up failing over the years. I have little intention of trying to catalog all those games on this site. I don’t even know if I’ll expand beyond Pokemon at this point. Pokemon is the only game I really know and feel comfortable working with; any other game is a little more of a mystery/crapshoot to me.

I only want to focus on games that are established and will hopefully stick around for a while longer. I see little point in documenting something like the Need for Speed TCG when nobody cares about it. If nobody peruses these obscure games, then I’ll have little motivation to work on them, so I need to stick to the popular games to draw traffic.

The Three Options

That leads me to three possible ways to proceed with this site…

1. Make it Pokemon TCG exclusive and create separate sister sites in the future.

If we went this route, I’d rename the site to be more Pokemon TCG oriented. The best name I’ve brainstormed so far is PkmnCards.com. Here is a mock-up of the site with that name:

I made the logo as an homage to the old Game Boy games, which I feel brings a certain je ne sais pas to the table. The advantage to having a separate site for each card game is that it would make it a little easier to manage things on the backend, and it allows more customization for each card game in terms of eventual advanced searching features (which I hope to add at some point).

This is model is based off of sports-reference.com, which has sister sites for various sports. They do host college sports databases on the main site, but all the major sports have their own URLs.

I could still possibly keep this URL to host minor TCGs and create separate sites for the major ones, if I was ever motivated enough to do that.

Another advantage to something like PkmnCards.com is that it’s a little more marketable/brandable and could possibly draw more of an audience/following than this current URL. I could also focus more on releasing Pokemon TCG news, and I think forums would be more of a possibility with that URL as well (though not guaranteed).

And even if we never expand to any other card games, then PkmnCards.com is a little better URL to have than TcgScans.com.

2. Keep using this URL and make separate homepages for each card game.

The homepage would look more like this with just a listing of all the games on the site. The Pokemon TCG home URL would be tcgscans.com/pokemon. Magic would be tcgscans.com/magic. Etc. This would make it searching and organization a little simpler.

There are a couple ways to set this up on the backend. I don’t know if I really like either solution, but in one scenario, the recent comments list would show comments mixed from different TCGs. Part of the issue there is that we use Disqus for commenting (which I’m a huge fan of) and I can’t filter their comment output.

I definitely do not want comments mixed since I’m sure most of you don’t care about Yu-Gi-Oh or Magic, and we could just NOT use Disqus, but I like it too much. :P

In another scenario I’d basically have to install separate databases at each URL, so each URL (tcgscans.com/pokemon, tcgscans.com/magic, etc.) would almost be like separate websites in themselves. That would allow the comments on the homepages to be specific to each game.

I don’t know if that’s the best solution either though because then there are separate backends for each game, and it almost seems more logical to just have different domains for each game at that point.

3. Uhhhh… I guess there are only 2 options. I lost count.

Where the heck is my abacus?

Conclusion

Please let me know if have you an opinion on this! Either comment below or send me an e-mail at adam@tcgscans.com. The more views and thoughts I can get on this, the better. I sometimes get close-minded when I’m analyzing stuff, so your opinions can help me look at this with a more open mindset before moving forward.

Even if you just have other URL ideas besides PkmnCards.com, please share!

I really appreciate the support you’ve all given so far and I want to move forward with this in the best way possible. Thanks!

-Adam

What’s up everyone? I thought I’d write a post regarding the latest developments with the site…

1. New scans!

Thanks to the help of a few gracious volunteers, the site is up to date with scans again! Over the past 4 or 5 days, we got about 5,000 new images uploaded and organized on the site for your viewing pleasure.

The new scans come to you courtesy of Martin from Pokemon-Paradijs who supplied me with the images and has given us permission to use them watermark-free (aside from the most recent set). One of my original goals was to have un-watermarked images, and now we’ve got them, which is pretty awesome!

In the future when new sets are released, I’m totally open for people submitting scans if they have access to a scanner. The reason being is that it takes Martin a few weeks from the first prereleases here in the US until he is able to get his scans done. I know most people (including myself) probably don’t want to wait that long, so if you’d like to contribute in the future, that would be great.

2. Rating system is going pretty well!

At first I wasn’t sure how the ratings would work, but so far so good. My hopeful theory was that as more and more people rated the cards, the ratings would even out over time. This seems to be the case for the most part, aside from the random Hoppip comfortably sitting in the 8.5 to 10.0 range.

My goal is for a newer Pokemon player to be able to view cards here, and get a general sense whether or not a card is good from the community rating. If you look at Black & White in order of highest rating first, which you can see here, it’s actually fairly accurate. Not perfect, but surprisingly decent.

3. Comments are good too!

I want to thank coolestman22, Curtis, Vinay Patel, and everyone else for their active discussion the past few days! I think it’s really cool that we’re able to comment on the cards and say whatever about them, whether it be a serious strategy-based question, fond memory, or snide remark regarding a dubious attack name.

Any discussion is cool with me; have fun with it!

I think what I may do in order to promote more discussion is redesign the home page to show a forum-like listing of the cards that have been most recently commented on. Or if not the home page, I could create pseudo-forum pages for different sets, modified legal cards, or whatever.

4. Plans for the Future

As I just alluded to, I think I want to redesign the home page. I’m not exactly sure how I want to change it, but I may just try to make it simpler like the Google home page and just have the big search bar. I’ll take some time to think about it, but if you have any suggestions, please let me know by commenting or e-mailing me.

I also have a list of a few random things I need to fix, like how prices for some cards are whack. I’ll try to take care of that kind of stuff this weekend. If you notice any bugs that could be fixed or improved, let me know.

One thing down the road I’ll try to add is a mobile version of the site. Right now I’m more concerned with getting the web version as complete as possible, then I’ll begin development for all you people with smart phones.

Oh and finally, full-text is something that will be in development for a while. It’s sort of a slow process typing out all the cards. Eventually I’ll enable full-text searching on the site, but for now, if you Google “site:tcgscans.com QUERY” it will work.

For example, here’s a search for Foul Play. Both Zoroarks come up, which is pretty cool. Only modified legal cards have their text typed out so far though. I’ll estimate that by Valentine’s day we’ll be done with the text, but we could be done a lot sooner.

After the text is done, then I’ll maybe work on allowing advanced searching/sorting features, like filtering out all Basic Grass Pokemon that have Free Retreat. That sort of thing.

Anyway, I guess that’s it for today. Thanks for reading and supporting the site!

-Adam